LAWS 1000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Jury Nullification, Rationality
Document Summary
It is important to think about what we expect from the legal system. There are problems that lead people to come before the courts. Courts exist to deal with legal issues, but there are a lot of factors, but none of these factors are legal factors. Any particular criminal offence will have its own facts, those presented by the defense and the prosecution. The lawyer will ask what happened, and a story will unfold. Social and political and economic problems get filtered out and get sifted into a small number of legal issues. The legal system cuts out the large parts of social problems and cut them down into legal problems. If the (cid:272)ourt is lucky, they achieve an outcome that feels just. Liberalism takes as a point of departure the idea that in society, the individuals that populate the society are rational free-choosing people that are independent within the community.
